Artificial Intelligence, Lean Method and Startup Product Innovation

Funded Research Proposal

As startups are at the forefront of adopting AI tools, it is important to understand whether AI can amplify the effects of lean methods in helping startups to be even more responsive to market conditions that before. And if so, to what extent and under what conditions AI can complement lean method in developing products.Read More

Disagreement is a Short-hand for Poor Listening: How Listening Experience Shapes Communications in Organizations

Funded Research Proposal

Across three proposed studies, we aim to investigate 1) whether employees view colleagues/employers who disagree with them as bad listeners, despite objective signs of attentive listening; and 2) whether users are more satisfied with chatbots that signal a high level of attitude agreement with the user.Read More

The Consequences of Prosocial Signals That Leak Political Information for Job-Seekers

Funded Research Proposal

I will explore whether job-seekers use these signals in a sophisticated or naïve fashion with respect to the political information that leaks through. I will also examine how employers respond to job-seekers who include such signals in their applications.Read More

The Closedness of Open Workspace: How Open-plan Offices Limit the Diversity of Job Applicants

Funded Research Proposal

However, we argue that open-plan offices can be detrimental to innovation by reducing the diversity of prospective employees. In particular, because this office design reduces privacy, increases informal oversight by peers, and escalates in-group vs. out-group social dynamicsRead More

Information Ambiguity in Entrepreneurial Experimentation

Funded Research Proposal

Pursuing entrepreneurial opportunities is characterized by high uncertainty because entrepreneurs look to find unsatisfied demand with their new products or services. In an attempt to reduce uncertainty, entrepreneurs experiment with potential customers, seeking feedback through interviews or prototypes. It allows the entrepreneurs to learn about the targeted market and whether their idea can satisfy that demand.Read More

Patents: Ability or Choice?

Funded Research Proposal

This paper’s main contributions are to use a novel data set, introduce a new natural experiment, and exploit a quasi-random shock to show that patenting choices affect three important dimensions of innovation outcomes: the patent quantity, the patent quality, and the firm-level inputs (R&D, investment, and employees).Read More

Talent Market Competition and Technology Spillovers

Funded Research Proposal

This research project aims to understand how innovation propagates through the reallocation of talents, and how this innovation diffusion process is shaped by the competition structure of talent labor markets. Specifically, we exploit various heterogenous shocks to firms, including credit supply shocks, financial constraints shocks, innovation shocks, to examine how firms react in their hiring and firing decisions under different competition structures of talent labor markets.Read More

Generalization and Exploration in Novel Environments

Funded Research Proposal

This study aims to highlight the generalization problem as a core challenge in organizational learning and strategic decision-making and explore how decision-makers may address this problem via different learning and choice strategies.Read More

Measuring Strategic Behavior by Gig Economy Workers: Multihoming and Repositioning

Funded Research Proposal

Using a structural model, we show that workers are highly heterogenous in their preferences for both multihoming and repositioning. We provide counterfactual estimates on the effects of proposed firm and regulatory policies aimed at multihoming and repositioning.Read More

Social Media and Startup Innovation: A Human Capital Perspective

Funded Research Proposal

In this study we plan to fill this research gap by examining whether social media can help startups to access broader knowledge and subsequently facilitate innovation. Our goal is twofold in this research. First, we explore the effect of social media adoption on startup’s knowledge diversity. Second, we analyze whether startups can successfully transfer the diversified knowledge into innovations.Read More

Field Experiments to Measure the Impact of Solar Lights at the Bottom of the Pyramid

Funded Research Proposal

Providing access to cleaner and cheaper lighting solutions is necessary to lift people out of poverty. The magnitude of the economic, health, and educational impacts created by these lighting solutions as we move up the energy ladder, however, is not clear.Read More

Industry-University Collaboration and Commercializing Chinese Corporate Innovation

Funded Research Proposal

We examine how industry-university collaboration (IUC) enhances Chinese firms’ commercialization of their technologies using a comprehensive dataset of medium- sized and large industrial firms and research universities in China.Read More

Towards a Causal Theory and Test of Network Effects: Structural Holes, Alliance-Network Externalities, and Organizational Innovation

Working Papers

We investigate whether the effect of network position on innovation is causal or spurious. Although empirical evidence demonstrates that certain structural positions in alliance networks (e.g. structural holes) affect firm innovation, it is hard to disentangle the factors allowing a firm to put itself in a certain position from the innovation outcomes that stem from being in that position.Read More

Social Media, Entrepreneurship and Institutional Environment

Funded Research Proposal

Entrepreneurial strategies to cope with dynamic environments are becoming increasingly important globally with the heightened technological and institutional disruptions in the recent and coming years. These dynamic environments are usually characterized by high velocity, complexity, ambiguity and unpredictability, creating additional challenges for entrepreneurs to find and realize opportunitiesRead More

A Machine Learning Approach To Likeable, and Memorable Brand Slogans

Funded Research Proposal

We propose to develop and validate a model that uses automatically extracted, high-dimensional sentence embeddings to predict the likeability and memorability of new and existing slogans.Read More

The Positive Effects of Sharing Innovation Successes and Failures

Funded Research Proposal

We postulate that interventions to increase sharing of failures can boost learning, increase the likelihood of creating a learning culture, and increase trust and reciprocal information sharing among teams and consumers. Further we examine the positive effects of sharing failures on interpersonal and in-group/out-group interaction at different stages of relationship (e.g., initial formation and stable relationship) and the effects on repeated interaction (e.g., a future relationship).Read More

How Do Job Candidates’ Salary Expectations Affect Firms’ Hiring Evaluations?

Funded Research Proposal

Firms often ask workers to indicate their salary expectations when they are applying for jobs. But, we currently have a limited understanding on how these salary expectations affect firms’ evaluation of the candidate: do firms evaluate candidates with low or high salary expectations more favorably? The goal of this research is to enrich our understanding of the labor market by elucidating the relationship between workers’ salary expectations and hiring evaluations.Read More

Mergers and Innovation: Evidence from the Pharmaceutical Industry

Funded Research Proposal

The goal for this paper is to detangle whether mergers and acquisitions occurring in the biopharmaceutical industry yield their intended effects. More specifically, how does increasing M&A activity affect different measures of innovation in the pharmaceutical industryRead More

Insider vs. Outsider Judgments of Diversity in Organizations

Funded Research Proposal

We propose that an important hurdle preventing organizations from diversifying is their ability to accurately diagnose a lack of diversity in their ranks in the first place. Specifically, we theorize that people who belong to or create groups within organizations (organizational “insiders”) perceive those groups to be more diverse than outside observers (organizational “outsiders”).Read More